Create an open source ebook system and expand the Android marketplace to make it dead simple for authors to skip the middle man and sell directly to Android users.
"The Guardian reports that in his new book, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,"
You've just rediscovered and then bastardized Aristotle's "unmoved mover." Only you call it gravity instead of a divine being. Aristotle's version made far more sense because the "unmoved mover," who is the "primal first cause of all of causality" is completely different in nature from the rest of existence by virtue of being able to effect cause without being an effect itself.
Federal law enforcement has it far worse. To be an agent after the age of 57, you have to kill a tree in paperwork to get through all of the waivers. At that age, you're too young to really retire and too old to credibly change your career. That's why they choose one of four options: move up, move out, go academic or go consultant.
What I don't fully understand is how NG could get what amounts to a quarter billion dollars a year to manage the state's IT infrastructure and still allow a situation like this to occur. I mean, I understand how it can HAPPEN, I don't understand why it's allowed to.
What makes you think Northrop Grumman had a choice? They still work for the state IT department at the end of the day. If the state IT department says "buy this POS because it's cheaper and don't build in redundancy because it's too expensive," then those are the NGC employees' marching orders.
This likely happened because of a perfect storm (I feel dirty even using that term) of government cheapness, government contractors lacking backbone and an event ramming the two together at supercollider speeds. I bet you right now there are admins on both sides of the contractor/employee divide right now saying "cheap sons of bitches wouldn't do $X" because that is usually how these things work.
I admit I was furious on property/creative rights grounds at first, but then it struck me that enforcement of copyleft could become extremely difficult at some point for the government. The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights.
Their solution is wrong. The easiest way to solve it would be to pass a law which requires Copyleft to be stated, in writing in a copyright office application. Otherwise, the government would take the approach of saying that if your Copyleft license is violated, it is 100% on you to prove in court since you didn't register it in advance under penalty of perjury.
and I know a lot of social conservatives who aren't happy with nudity and profanity on TV and radio when kids are awake. In fact, based on the ones I know, I'd say they'd far rather their child see some boobies than another child or a family get blown up.
Of course, war is different for children, especially boys. There is a big difference between seeing soldiers fight one another and seeing senseless crime and atrocities. You can claim there isn't, but that doesn't make it so, and for millennia, civilizations have understood the difference between glorifying the warrior ethos and senseless violence. The former, is not inherently harmful to children, and is actually good for a society that wants its boys to grow up to be **men** and not overgrown boys who act like pansies in the face of a violent world. The US has lost sight of the value of that since unlike the rest of the modern world, no country has tried to invade us in almost 200 years come ~2013 (when the British invaded the US in the War of 1812).
If there were members of the KKK, in robes, with baseball bats and truncheons at a polling station, it would have been national news even though the KKK has probably even fewer members today. The story is about voter intimidation.
I doubt a single one of the people self-righteously attacking the GOP right now has the integrity to attack the Democrats and the way the mainstream media covers for them.
In the last 2 years alone, there have been scandals involving the Democrats that would have crippled the GOP by the time the media was done harping on them. Take, for instance, the scandal involving the Black Panthers. Now that Obama's in power, he's not considered a whistleblower. He's considered a "disgruntled ex employee of the DoJ." The left and mainstream media have largely taken the same "no evil here, move along people" stance on that issue that the Bush Administration did over the NSA wiretapping and its whistleblowers.
The media is even being prohibited from going near even clean up sites on the beach in the Gulf under penalty of imprisonment--under a statute that BP helped create. Where's the media? Where's the outrage over a majority Democratic Congress and President shackling the press? I could go on, but I think I've made my point for those who've been paying attention these last 2 years.
In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap.
1) Means test Social Security and prohibit double dipping.
2) Means test the shit out of Medicare. If you can pay for it, Medicare sends you the bill, even if it leaves you with an estate balance of $0 when your kids go to inherit your wealth.
3) Bring our troops home from the 130+ bases we have abroad and put a division on the southern border instead.
4) Stop this bullshit "stimulus spending," most of which goes either to irreparably bankrupt institutions (hint: the balances on most banks are so deep in the red that the US literally could never make the balance) and government institutions at the state and local levels. It would be more effective to throw excess $1 bills in drum barrels, light them on fire and call it "heating for the homeless" than what we have been doing.
5) Cut all federal subsidies. All of them. Let me say that again. All of them. As in everything from road assistance, to law enforcement assistance, to university grants, to farm subsidies. Nuke the entire system from orbit and don't even consider restarting it until the economy has recovered fully.
In five incredibly easy steps, we can go from a federal deficit to a federal surplus in the middle of a nascent depression. Congress could probably draft most of these bills over an extended lunch break.
It's because companies frequently let their normal employees treat IT staff in ways that are fireable offenses if done to the rest of the company. Call them up, foaming at the mouth screaming because the email server is down, for example. Or God forbid that an in-house developer has a few bugs in their app.
My wife is an in-house developer at a large company. I can't even begin to count the number of times she and her group have been savagely attacked by users who are so fucking stupid that they literally freeze up if a single new button appears in the UI.
The dirty little trend I've noticed is that 9 times out of 10, the people who attack her are non-technical female employees. Most men don't dare attack a female developer at that level, especially not one who is competent (the second worst fury, aside from a scorned woman, is HR coming to the aid of a woman like that against a bombastic man). Male developers also often don't hesitate to humiliate users who treat them like that.
There was need to shut it down. That was an authoritarian move that could just as easily been handled with the DoJ coming up with a list of concrete steps the program must take before it can become a part of the official university processes.
Unless there is some requirement for accessibility, blind people will be denied the ability to read, shut off from all education and employment. Are you OK with that, seriously?
You probably have no idea how much your comment sounds like a hysterical parent screaming "will somebody please think of the children" right now...
The natural progression of egalitarianism will lead to this and then to people being punished for publishing content that is not accessible. Your little blog or mom and pop online store will get raked over the coals because it's a "public accommodation," and the argument will be that "sure, you have every right to speak your mind online, but you better make sure the blind and deaf can participate too."
The DoJ recently shut down a trial program--a trial program--that let students use Kindles at several universities instead of buying text books. Their logic was that since Kindles have mediocre accessibility that prevents the blind from fully using them, the mere fact of offering the program is ipso facto discrimination.
That logic didn't come out of nowhere. It is it the end state of egalitarianism: if we ALL can't do it, then no one can. It brings us down to the lowest common denominator. Instead of providing subsidies to Amazon or giving them the legal stink eye so they'd hurry up and make it happen, the DoJ simply shut it down under the pain of loss of liberty. That is the tyranny that awaits us if we give in in the name of "equality."
Apparently you missed the part of the article that said "middle school students." We were doing pre-algebra in 6th and 7th grade in my middle school, and we were hardly an elite class or school. If a student had turned in
4 + 3 + 2 = (9) + 2 = 11
for
4 + 3 + 2 = ( ) + 2
they would have asked why you thought the question asked for a second = operator. It clearly doesn't. It asks "what number makes both sides equal." That is how you get late pre-teens to start thinking for algebra.
The difference is that Android's Dalvik VM doesn't claim to be a JVM. Microsoft claimed that it did implement a standard JVM when, in fact, it violated the IP licensing agreement by corrupting the standard API with non-standard functionality.
“This response has been called a running equal sign—similar to how a calculator might work when the numbers and equal sign are entered as they appear in the sentence,” he explains. “However, this understanding is incorrect. The correct solution makes both sides equal. So the understanding should be 4+3+2=(7)+2. Now both sides of the equal sign equal 9.”
It's not the calculators... it's the students and teachers. You cannot blame a machine for students either failing to understand or just never grasping that going from "4+3+2=( )+2" to "4+3+2=( )+2=11" is nonsensical. Don't make excuses for them. I say this as someone who barely got through math classes (and being 27, I'm in the same generation as most of these kids), and even I looked at their thought process and muttered "W... T.... F....?"
That the first competing VM to be throttled by the patent holder would be a Java-based one, not a.NET-based one. I bet Steve Ballmer is laughing his ass off right now saying, "even I'm not that stupid."
Note to Microsoft: now would be a perfect time to stick your boot up Oracle's ass so far they'll cough up rubber for a week by signing an iron clad patent licensing agreement with the FSF and Mono team that says that Microsoft will never sue an OSS.NET implementation that is released under the GPL or a BSD-like license. (The fact is that Microsoft develops Windows-specific APIs too rapidly and too well for Mono to be a threat to its business).
There is nothing--nothing--that Assange can do that will take the blood off his and his organization's hands for the way they handled the first round of documents. This is war, and as an anti-war activist, Assange knows damn well that the price of a mistake or negligence in war is someone getting hurt. This isn't nerds versus jocks in high school, this is an armed conflict in one of the most violent places on Earth and he put the spotlight on a number of civilians in a way that makes them targets of opportunity in a war zone.
Oh, I don't know, slick. Maybe Verizon's legal counsel might come up with a list of suggestions based on, you know, statutes, case law, stuff like that. For example, if a web site advocates the blatant overthrow of the United States Government or is dedicated to the distribution of child pornography or warez, they might tell their technical staff to take it out of Verizon's DNS or throttle it down to uselessness.
Realistically, you have two choices: either Verizon jealously guards its prerogative or you will get the law enforcement authorities in this country using the FCC to ram down a f#$%-you-up-the-@$$ set of restrictions like they did to telecoms via CALEA. At least in the former, they have the freedom to unblock content based on user feedback without worrying about the feds.
But lives are at stake if the information is not leaked either, since the leaks have proved that the US military forces sometimes act... rashly.
You can't predict how many civilians may die in such a fluid situation tomorrow if US forces have to act quickly. What you can predict is the extremely high probability that every single solitary last informant/source in those documents will take a dirt nap after the Taliban locates them.
Blogger, WordPress.com and TypePad make up the majority of small media hosting. If you have something to say online, typically you sign up for an account with one of those. All three of them are owned by private companies who have far more incentive, on paper, to regulate what you say than Verizon does. Verizon doesn't give a shit if you are birther, truther, armed opponent of the Zionist Occupation Government, hate the Blue-Eyed Devil or worship the love child of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Puff the Magic Dragon. Your data looks about the same to them as CNN.com or FoxNews.com. It's Google, WordPress and SixApart who have to look at the content and say "do we really want this on our machines?"
The fact is that in terms of censorship, you know real censorship like "no one sees your content because it is proscribed," the hosting service is 10x the threat that the ISPs are. They are the ones who people pressure to shut down content they don't like, they're the ones who decide your content is bad for their reputation and they're the ones that dumb your data into the ether if you become too much of a rabble rouser.
If a pressure group goes to Verizon and wants them to censor your content, they'll just say "f#$% off, jackass, we're not going to build filters into our pipes." That's why those guys go after the hosts.
Slashdot Mirror
Create an open source ebook system and expand the Android marketplace to make it dead simple for authors to skip the middle man and sell directly to Android users.
You've just rediscovered and then bastardized Aristotle's "unmoved mover." Only you call it gravity instead of a divine being. Aristotle's version made far more sense because the "unmoved mover," who is the "primal first cause of all of causality" is completely different in nature from the rest of existence by virtue of being able to effect cause without being an effect itself.
Federal law enforcement has it far worse. To be an agent after the age of 57, you have to kill a tree in paperwork to get through all of the waivers. At that age, you're too young to really retire and too old to credibly change your career. That's why they choose one of four options: move up, move out, go academic or go consultant.
What makes you think Northrop Grumman had a choice? They still work for the state IT department at the end of the day. If the state IT department says "buy this POS because it's cheaper and don't build in redundancy because it's too expensive," then those are the NGC employees' marching orders.
This likely happened because of a perfect storm (I feel dirty even using that term) of government cheapness, government contractors lacking backbone and an event ramming the two together at supercollider speeds. I bet you right now there are admins on both sides of the contractor/employee divide right now saying "cheap sons of bitches wouldn't do $X" because that is usually how these things work.
I admit I was furious on property/creative rights grounds at first, but then it struck me that enforcement of copyleft could become extremely difficult at some point for the government. The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights.
Their solution is wrong. The easiest way to solve it would be to pass a law which requires Copyleft to be stated, in writing in a copyright office application. Otherwise, the government would take the approach of saying that if your Copyleft license is violated, it is 100% on you to prove in court since you didn't register it in advance under penalty of perjury.
and I know a lot of social conservatives who aren't happy with nudity and profanity on TV and radio when kids are awake. In fact, based on the ones I know, I'd say they'd far rather their child see some boobies than another child or a family get blown up.
Of course, war is different for children, especially boys. There is a big difference between seeing soldiers fight one another and seeing senseless crime and atrocities. You can claim there isn't, but that doesn't make it so, and for millennia, civilizations have understood the difference between glorifying the warrior ethos and senseless violence. The former, is not inherently harmful to children, and is actually good for a society that wants its boys to grow up to be **men** and not overgrown boys who act like pansies in the face of a violent world. The US has lost sight of the value of that since unlike the rest of the modern world, no country has tried to invade us in almost 200 years come ~2013 (when the British invaded the US in the War of 1812).
If there were members of the KKK, in robes, with baseball bats and truncheons at a polling station, it would have been national news even though the KKK has probably even fewer members today. The story is about voter intimidation.
And by he, I meant "the DoJ lawyer/whistleblower."
I doubt a single one of the people self-righteously attacking the GOP right now has the integrity to attack the Democrats and the way the mainstream media covers for them.
In the last 2 years alone, there have been scandals involving the Democrats that would have crippled the GOP by the time the media was done harping on them. Take, for instance, the scandal involving the Black Panthers. Now that Obama's in power, he's not considered a whistleblower. He's considered a "disgruntled ex employee of the DoJ." The left and mainstream media have largely taken the same "no evil here, move along people" stance on that issue that the Bush Administration did over the NSA wiretapping and its whistleblowers.
The media is even being prohibited from going near even clean up sites on the beach in the Gulf under penalty of imprisonment--under a statute that BP helped create. Where's the media? Where's the outrage over a majority Democratic Congress and President shackling the press? I could go on, but I think I've made my point for those who've been paying attention these last 2 years.
1) Means test Social Security and prohibit double dipping.
2) Means test the shit out of Medicare. If you can pay for it, Medicare sends you the bill, even if it leaves you with an estate balance of $0 when your kids go to inherit your wealth.
3) Bring our troops home from the 130+ bases we have abroad and put a division on the southern border instead.
4) Stop this bullshit "stimulus spending," most of which goes either to irreparably bankrupt institutions (hint: the balances on most banks are so deep in the red that the US literally could never make the balance) and government institutions at the state and local levels. It would be more effective to throw excess $1 bills in drum barrels, light them on fire and call it "heating for the homeless" than what we have been doing.
5) Cut all federal subsidies. All of them. Let me say that again. All of them. As in everything from road assistance, to law enforcement assistance, to university grants, to farm subsidies. Nuke the entire system from orbit and don't even consider restarting it until the economy has recovered fully.
In five incredibly easy steps, we can go from a federal deficit to a federal surplus in the middle of a nascent depression. Congress could probably draft most of these bills over an extended lunch break.
A tool that Oracle and Adobe can take for a legal Menage a trois
It's because companies frequently let their normal employees treat IT staff in ways that are fireable offenses if done to the rest of the company. Call them up, foaming at the mouth screaming because the email server is down, for example. Or God forbid that an in-house developer has a few bugs in their app.
My wife is an in-house developer at a large company. I can't even begin to count the number of times she and her group have been savagely attacked by users who are so fucking stupid that they literally freeze up if a single new button appears in the UI.
The dirty little trend I've noticed is that 9 times out of 10, the people who attack her are non-technical female employees. Most men don't dare attack a female developer at that level, especially not one who is competent (the second worst fury, aside from a scorned woman, is HR coming to the aid of a woman like that against a bombastic man). Male developers also often don't hesitate to humiliate users who treat them like that.
There was need to shut it down. That was an authoritarian move that could just as easily been handled with the DoJ coming up with a list of concrete steps the program must take before it can become a part of the official university processes.
You probably have no idea how much your comment sounds like a hysterical parent screaming "will somebody please think of the children" right now...
The natural progression of egalitarianism will lead to this and then to people being punished for publishing content that is not accessible. Your little blog or mom and pop online store will get raked over the coals because it's a "public accommodation," and the argument will be that "sure, you have every right to speak your mind online, but you better make sure the blind and deaf can participate too."
The DoJ recently shut down a trial program--a trial program--that let students use Kindles at several universities instead of buying text books. Their logic was that since Kindles have mediocre accessibility that prevents the blind from fully using them, the mere fact of offering the program is ipso facto discrimination.
That logic didn't come out of nowhere. It is it the end state of egalitarianism: if we ALL can't do it, then no one can. It brings us down to the lowest common denominator. Instead of providing subsidies to Amazon or giving them the legal stink eye so they'd hurry up and make it happen, the DoJ simply shut it down under the pain of loss of liberty. That is the tyranny that awaits us if we give in in the name of "equality."
that there was a time when people actually fled in droves to IE the way they are switching to Firefox and Chrome.
Anyone who wonders why IE 6 became the de facto standard just needs to find a download of Netscape Communicator.
Apparently you missed the part of the article that said "middle school students." We were doing pre-algebra in 6th and 7th grade in my middle school, and we were hardly an elite class or school. If a student had turned in
4 + 3 + 2 = (9) + 2 = 11
for
4 + 3 + 2 = ( ) + 2
they would have asked why you thought the question asked for a second = operator. It clearly doesn't. It asks "what number makes both sides equal." That is how you get late pre-teens to start thinking for algebra.
The difference is that Android's Dalvik VM doesn't claim to be a JVM. Microsoft claimed that it did implement a standard JVM when, in fact, it violated the IP licensing agreement by corrupting the standard API with non-standard functionality.
It's not the calculators... it's the students and teachers. You cannot blame a machine for students either failing to understand or just never grasping that going from "4+3+2=( )+2" to "4+3+2=( )+2=11" is nonsensical. Don't make excuses for them. I say this as someone who barely got through math classes (and being 27, I'm in the same generation as most of these kids), and even I looked at their thought process and muttered "W... T.... F....?"
That the first competing VM to be throttled by the patent holder would be a Java-based one, not a .NET-based one. I bet Steve Ballmer is laughing his ass off right now saying, "even I'm not that stupid."
Note to Microsoft: now would be a perfect time to stick your boot up Oracle's ass so far they'll cough up rubber for a week by signing an iron clad patent licensing agreement with the FSF and Mono team that says that Microsoft will never sue an OSS .NET implementation that is released under the GPL or a BSD-like license. (The fact is that Microsoft develops Windows-specific APIs too rapidly and too well for Mono to be a threat to its business).
There is nothing--nothing--that Assange can do that will take the blood off his and his organization's hands for the way they handled the first round of documents. This is war, and as an anti-war activist, Assange knows damn well that the price of a mistake or negligence in war is someone getting hurt. This isn't nerds versus jocks in high school, this is an armed conflict in one of the most violent places on Earth and he put the spotlight on a number of civilians in a way that makes them targets of opportunity in a war zone.
Oh, I don't know, slick. Maybe Verizon's legal counsel might come up with a list of suggestions based on, you know, statutes, case law, stuff like that. For example, if a web site advocates the blatant overthrow of the United States Government or is dedicated to the distribution of child pornography or warez, they might tell their technical staff to take it out of Verizon's DNS or throttle it down to uselessness.
Realistically, you have two choices: either Verizon jealously guards its prerogative or you will get the law enforcement authorities in this country using the FCC to ram down a f#$%-you-up-the-@$$ set of restrictions like they did to telecoms via CALEA. At least in the former, they have the freedom to unblock content based on user feedback without worrying about the feds.
You can't predict how many civilians may die in such a fluid situation tomorrow if US forces have to act quickly. What you can predict is the extremely high probability that every single solitary last informant/source in those documents will take a dirt nap after the Taliban locates them.
Blogger, WordPress.com and TypePad make up the majority of small media hosting. If you have something to say online, typically you sign up for an account with one of those. All three of them are owned by private companies who have far more incentive, on paper, to regulate what you say than Verizon does. Verizon doesn't give a shit if you are birther, truther, armed opponent of the Zionist Occupation Government, hate the Blue-Eyed Devil or worship the love child of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Puff the Magic Dragon. Your data looks about the same to them as CNN.com or FoxNews.com. It's Google, WordPress and SixApart who have to look at the content and say "do we really want this on our machines?"
The fact is that in terms of censorship, you know real censorship like "no one sees your content because it is proscribed," the hosting service is 10x the threat that the ISPs are. They are the ones who people pressure to shut down content they don't like, they're the ones who decide your content is bad for their reputation and they're the ones that dumb your data into the ether if you become too much of a rabble rouser.
If a pressure group goes to Verizon and wants them to censor your content, they'll just say "f#$% off, jackass, we're not going to build filters into our pipes." That's why those guys go after the hosts.
is that it lets people moderate AND post at the same time. That is the #1 reason why it often degenerates into ideological and immature flame wars.